A Dangerous Age / 続十代の性典 / Zoku judai no seiten (1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #118

 

Ayako Wakao

The Japanese title of this film (which translates as ‘Teenage Sex Diary Sequel’) is somewhat misleading as this is a separate story from Judai no seiten and, while it again features Yoko Minamida, Ayako Wakao and Miki Odagiri, they are playing new characters.

Yoko Minamida

 

Akiko (Minamida) is an 18-year-old high school student at a single-sex (possibly Catholic) school. One day, seeing Yoda (Ken Hasebe), a male student, drop a watch in the street, she picks it up and runs after him to return it, but he jumps onto a train before she can do so. She manages to find him at the station the next day, when he treats her to coffee and cake before inviting her to see his flat. Akiko naively accepts, but flees the place after he makes a pass. As she leaves, Yoda calls after her, saying that she is welcome to visit anytime. 

Jun Negami

 

Meanwhile, Akiko’s best friend, Natsuko (Wakao), accepts an invitation from Toshio (Yosuke Irie) to a party but is forced to stay home by her mother, who wants her to study maths at home with the new tutor she’s hired, a medical student named Masato (Jun Negami). Feeling guilty at standing up Toshio, Akiko pays him a visit the next day to apologise. However, when she failed to appear, he had ended up being seduced by an older woman (Murasaki Fujima) and losing his virginity. Natsuko has no knowledge of this, so she’s shocked to find that the sweet, gentle boy she had known has changed overnight and now thinks that he’s Dan Duryea. When Toshio tries to force himself on her, she gives him a few slaps and a good telling off, and decides not to see him again. Despite her annoyance, Natsuko takes the incident in her stride, forgets about him and moves on.

 

Akiko, on the other hand, proves less able to handle this kind of situation. Natsuko’s new tutor is actually Akiko’s cousin, whom she has feelings for, so she begins to feel jealous as she sees Masato taking an interest in his new pupil, even though this jealousy proves groundless. Masato is actually so much in love with his cousin that his thesis is on the viability of incestuous marriage. Nevertheless, Akiko’s feelings of insecurity are compounded when she discovers that her widowed mother (Kuniko Miyake) has been having a clandestine relationship with a businessman, Ueda (Nobuo Nakamura). Believing herself unwanted, she remembers her open invitation to Yoda’s apartment and foolishly goes there, where she is not only raped but impregnated. When she misses her period, her bitchy classmate (Miki Odagiri) begins to suspect the truth and starts spreading rumours. Things come to a head when the pregnant Akiko finds herself cast as that icon of purity, Joan of Arc, in the school play… 

Miki Odagiri

 

Ayako Wakao, Yoko Minamida and Michiko Saga

This is a slight improvement on Judai no seiten as it’s not quite as risible despite some daft moments. Director Koji Shima has been replaced by the younger Kozo Saeki (1912-72), who also made The Girl Who Tamed Beasts. At first, I thought that the Christian propaganda featured in the first film had been scrapped until I noticed that Michiko Saga (in one of her first film appearances, here playing another classmate of Akiko’s) was wearing a crucifix, and then Ayako Wakao appeared playing a bishop in the school’s Joan of Arc play. I’m unsure how to account for the Christian theme, but perhaps screenwriter Katsuya Susaki or producer Itsuo Doi (both of whom worked on all four films in this series) were Christians, or perhaps it was normal during this period for reasonably wealthy Japanese families to send their daughters to Catholic schools. In any case, although we may laugh at certain aspects of these movies today, it’s not difficult to see how they might have served a valuable function at the time in encouraging discussion of awkward subjects.

 

The Girl Who Tamed Beasts / 猛獣使いの少女 / Mōjūzukai no shōjo (1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #60

Chiemi Eri

 

This Daiei production stars the 15-year-old Chiemi Eri as Mayumi, a teenage circus performer employed by an American circus company visiting Japan. She is the child of a Japanese father and an American mother; when the war between the two countries began, her father was sent back to Japan not knowing that his wife was pregnant. Mayumi’s mother died not long after giving birth to her and she was she was brought up by the kindly Kosuke (Minoru Chiaki), who works as a clown in the same circus. In an interview for a Japanese newspaper, Mayumi mentions that she hopes one day to find her real father, Sokichi (Joji Oka). Fate brings them together, but Sokichi is ashamed of his humble status as a street musician and struggles with the question of whether he should reveal his identity to his daughter… 

Minoru Chiaki

This is definitely a film for circus buffs, featuring as it does plentiful footage of the real-life E.K. Fernandez All American Circus (founded in 1903 in Hawaii) which travelled internationally. Presumably, some bright spark at Daiei learned that the circus were visiting Japan and saw an opportunity to create a vehicle for teenage singing sensation Chiemi Eri, whose first film this was. Eri proved that she could act a bit too and immediately became a hugely popular film star as well.

Jun Negami and Ayako Wakao

 

Appearing here in her second film is Ayako Wakao, then just 18. She plays a rather wholesome barmaid in a few scenes and is given nothing very interesting to do here, so there’s no indication that she would be a star only one year later.

 

Joji Oka

 

The simple story cooked up by screenwriters Toshiro Ide and Umetsugu Inoue feels overstretched and the lion-taming climax is unconvincing (poorly-edited shots of a real tiger combined with shots of a stuffed animal), but otherwise this is a well-made film of some charm. What really saves it is the excellent performances of Joji Oka (star of Ozu’s Dragnet Girl) and Kurosawa favourite Minoru Chiaki as the two fathers – they actually manage to bring some gravitas to the lightweight material. The same cannot be said of the American who plays the circus manager, unfortunately – he gives quite the most wooden performance I’ve ever seen.

 

Wooden American guy

 

The Girl Who Tamed Beasts was directed by Kozo Saeki (1912-72), a Daiei contract director who helmed over a 100 films between 1937 and 1966, all of which appear to have fallen into obscurity.

 

 

For further information on the career of Chiemi Eri, and how her singing style was shaped by the post-war American occupation of Japan, see Michael Furmanovsky's article 'From Occupation Base Clubs to the Pop Charts: Eri Chiemi, Yukimura Izumi, and the Birth of Japan's Postwar Popular Music Industry'.